A couple of months ago, Mike Sullivan was fuming about something he heard on the radio.
Sully won’t play the kids.
Nothing irritated the now-former coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins more than that.
Standing in a hallway at the team’s practice facility, a very animated Sullivan pointed toward replica Stanley Cup banners and said, “They don’t ever take those banners down.”
The message was simple: We haven’t had any good, young players in years because we traded prospects and draft picks in the name of winning more of those banners.
Then, his mind went back to what he had heard on the radio.
“Did I not play Jake Guentzel? How about Bryan Rust? How about Conor Sheary? Did he not go straight to Sidney Crosby’s line?”
He did play them, of course. He won championships with them. He’s the most accomplished coach in Penguins history and maybe the best. He saved Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang from being one-hit wonders. He’ll be able to name his next job. Only three men in Pittsburgh sports history have coached teams to more than one professional championship: Chuck Noll (Steelers), Danny Murtaugh (Pirates) and Sullivan.
He’s a giant in Penguins history and always will be.
It was also probably time.
Both can be true.
When people speak of the Sullivan era in Pittsburgh many years from now, they’ll say he was a wildly successful coach but that he stayed for too long. They said the same thing about Noll because the Steelers won nothing in the 1980s. This is always what we say when a team endures a championship drought after a period of unrivaled success. Did he stay too long? Maybe. You can hardly suggest the Penguins have looked like a well-coached team over the past few seasons.
I would argue that the Penguins’ biggest problem in recent seasons has been roster construction. Who would have coached this season’s Penguins to success? Look at that roster. Seriously. Scotty Bowman wouldn’t have won with that group.
The Penguins are rebuilding, and it’s going to take a while longer. That much is clear. Sullivan looked me in the eye in March and told me that he wanted to be the coach who oversaw the rebuild, that he wanted to still be the coach when “we get great again.”
I believed him then, and I believe him now.
Something clearly changed between then and now, and that’s OK. Things change. Approaches change. My sense, and this is also essentially what Kyle Dubas said last week, is that the Penguins aren’t going to rush their way back into the postseason. Dubas won’t patch up the roster well enough just to get the Penguins back into the playoffs. Rather, it’s going to be a slow build that Dubas hopes leads to a Stanley Cup-caliber team for many years.
It’s not that Sullivan didn’t want to coach a Stanley Cup-caliber team for many years. Who wouldn’t want that?
However, there likely was a discrepancy between the two men in terms of just how long this will take. Dubas is in it for the long haul. Meanwhile, Sullivan wants to win right now, because that’s what he always wants. I’ve covered many coaches over the years, but I’ve never witnessed one who takes losing harder than Sullivan. It kills him. The last three years have been torture. You may think he’s part of the problem, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps Sullivan wasn’t at his best in recent seasons. However, Sullivan had grown frustrated by what he has viewed as an insufficient roster.
So yeah, it was time.
Sullivan showed up in Pittsburgh and did precisely what he was hired to do. He couldn’t finish the end game of pushing Crosby and his teammates to the top of the mountain again.
It’s not a crime. It’s hockey. It’s hard to win. Nobody failed here — not Sullivan, not Crosby, not Dubas. Winning the Stanley Cup every year isn’t a birthright.
There are positives here for everyone involved. The Penguins could use a breath of fresh air, a coach to usher in a future generation while also working seamlessly with Crosby in his final years. That will be a tricky situation, but it can be done. Despite Sullivan’s great success as a coach, it’s hard to kick the reality that things with the Penguins feel stale.
Sullivan will be a breath of fresh air wherever he lands, whether it be with the Rangers, Islanders, Bruins or elsewhere. Give him the ingredients, and he’s one hell of a chef.
The ingredients were no longer plentiful in Pittsburgh, and it probably didn’t make sense for him to keep cooking here.
In retrospect, when general manager Jim Rutherford stunned the Penguins by leaving in 2021, it was the beginning of the end for Sullivan. The next GM, Ron Hextall, never saw eye to eye with Sullivan, and the Penguins’ roster declined rapidly on Hextall’s watch. While Sullivan likes Dubas and has long been impressed by his intellect, Dubas has to trust his vision of the Penguins’ future. Neither did anything wrong. Sometimes hockey happens. Sometimes the timing for a good relationship is no longer there.
The last time Sullivan stood behind the bench during a Penguins playoff game was in 2022, when his team fell to the Rangers in overtime of Game 7. The night before that game, Rutherford reached out to me, more than a year after he’d resigned as Penguins GM. He asked whom I thought would win Game 7. I responded that I didn’t have a clue. Rutherford was at his home in Raleigh, and the winner of the Penguins-Rangers series would play Carolina next.
“I’ll see you next week in Raleigh,” he said. “Sid and Sully will find a way.”
If Rutherford were still in Pittsburgh, the Penguins never would have started a rebuild. Not yet, at least. And Sullivan would still be the head coach. Rutherford’s faith in him was unlike anything I’ve seen. They’d still be trying to replicate 2016 and 2017. There is something admirable about that. But Rutherford is long gone, and it is probably best, at this point, that Sullivan has followed.
On Sullivan’s final night behind the bench, his Penguins fittingly beat the Washington Capitals. When you think of those Stanley Cup runs, you can’t help but envision peak Crosby and peak Alex Ovechkin going at it in three consecutive, magical springs. Finally, Ovechkin and the Capitals beat the Penguins in the final chapter. Sullivan and Crosby finally lost that battle, but they still won the war.
I’d suggest viewing Sullivan’s tenure as Penguins coach through that same lens.
It’s all the cycle of life, really. Nothing bad happened here. No one is to blame. It was just time.
When Crosby made his Pittsburgh debut on Oct. 8, 2005, scoring his first NHL goal in his official introduction to the city he’d someday own, Mike Sullivan was the coach on the other bench for the Boston Bruins.
I think the cosmos always intended for them to be together and to win together. It would have been a grand conclusion for Sullivan to still be behind the bench for Crosby’s final game in Pittsburgh, whenever that time comes. What a nice story it would have been.
Happy endings, though, are often left for Hollywood, not the NHL. And that’s OK.
They don’t ever take those banners down.
(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
